New Article Published on Conflicts in Emergent Orders

Studies in Emergent Order is pleased to publish “Design vs. the Design Industry: Conflicts in Emergent Orders” by Jody Boehnert.

Jody Boehnert’s paper argues that despite emergent skills, designers are not able to effectively address contemporary problems in regards to sustainability due to conflicts with the emergent order of the market. Critically, ‘design’ is not the same as the ‘design industry.’ The design industry operates according to highly reductive feedback generated by capitalism that systemically ignores signals from the ecological and social systems. These conflicts result in severe distortions of knowledge and reason thereby eliminating prospects for long-term prosperity.

Jody Boehnert is the Director of EcoLabs, and recently finished an AHRC funded PhD at the University of Brighton entitled “The Visual Communication of Ecological Literacy: Designing, Learning and Emergent Ecological Perception.” She will be a post-doctoral visiting fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Studies in Emergent Order (SIEO) is an open-access journal dedicated to fostering research, discussion and publication concerning the roles played by and implications of emergent order phenomena, particularly in society but not excluding other areas.